Itinerant chiral ferromagnetism in a trapped Rashba spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas

Abstract

How ferromagnetic phases emerge in itinerant systems is an outstanding problem in quantum magnetism. Here we consider a repulsive two-component Fermi gas confined in a two dimensional isotropic harmonic potential and subject to a large Rashba spin-orbit (SO) coupling, whose single-particle dispersion can be tailored by adjusting the SO coupling strength. We show that the interplay among SO coupling, correlation effects and mean-field repulsion leads to a competition between ferromagnetic and non-magnetic phases. At intermediate interaction strengths, ferromagnetic phase emerges which can be well described by the mean-field Hartree-Fock theory; whereas at strong interaction strengths, a strongly correlated non-magnetic phase is favored due to the beyond-mean-field quantum correlation effects. Furthermore, the ferromagnetic phase of this system possesses a chiral current density induced by the Rashba spin-orbit coupling, whose experimental signature is investigated.

Main text: 5 pages, 6 figures; Supplement: 4 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Spin-Injection Spectroscopy of a Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gas
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• Experimental realization of a two-dimensional synthetic spin-orbit coupling in ultracold Fermi gases
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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Chiral Supersolid in Spin-Orbit-Coupled Bose Gases with Soft-Core Long-Range Interactions
• A generalized Stoner criterion and versatile spin ordering in two-dimensional spin-orbit coupled electron systems
• Universal relations for hybridized $s$- and $p$-wave interactions from spin-orbital coupling
• Chiral Raman coupling for spin-orbit coupling in ultracold atomic gases
• Itinerant ferromagnetism of a dipolar Fermi gas with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling
• Gauging away the Stoner model: Engineering unconventional metallic ferromagnetism with artificial gauge fields